A federal judge on Monday issued a ruling in a case involving a counterclaim filed by former President Donald Trump against author E. Jean Carroll.
The judge rejected the former president’s claim that Carroll defamed him “with statements she made in media appearances following her successful defamation and battery lawsuit against him, which resulted in a $5 million damage award,” ABC News reported.
Trump’s lawyers argued that Carroll’s statements caused “significant harm to his reputation,” which made him entitled to punitive and compensatory damages.
Carroll’s comments followed a verdict from a New York jury in May, which held Trump accountable for sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room during the 1990s. He subsequently defamed her in a 2022 Truth Social post by dismissing her allegations as “a Hoax and a lie.”
In her public appearances after the verdict, Carroll maintained that Trump had raped her, even though the jury concluded that Carroll hadn’t demonstrated Trump’s guilt for rape according to the definition in New York penal law. Rather, the jury determined that Trump had “sexually abused” Carroll.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee and Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the jury’s finding “implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her” with his fingers.
“[I]n other words, that Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside New York Penal Law,” Kaplan wrote in his order dismissing Trump’s counterclaim.
“The instructions with respect to the rape question thus made clear that if the jury found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, but not also with his penis, it was obliged to answer ‘no’ to the rape question,” the judge wrote. “However, if it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll digitally, it was obliged to answer ‘yes’ to the sexual abuse question, as the New York Penal Law definition of ‘sexual abuse’ encompasses such conduct.”
Carroll’s original lawsuit alleging that Trump defamed her in 2019 while he was president is scheduled to go to trial in January, ABC News noted.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, responded to the judge’s ruling on Monday.
“That means that the January 15th jury trial will be limited to a narrow set of issues and shouldn’t take very long to complete,” Kaplan said. “E. Jean Carroll looks forward to obtaining additional compensatory and punitive damages based on the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made in 2019.”
Last month, Kaplan rejected Trump’s request for a new trial following the earlier decision that Carroll was entitled to millions in damages. According to Kaplan’s ruling, the jury’s initial verdict wasn’t “seriously erroneous” or a “miscarriage of justice.”
“Trump filed the counterclaim on Tuesday that alleged that Carroll defamed him when she accused him of raping her during an appearance on CNN on May 10, which is just a day after a nine-member jury found that Trump did not commit rape. According to the counterclaim, Trump alleged that Carroll defamed him when she said, ‘oh yes he did, oh yes he did,’ in response to an interview question on CNN asking for her thoughts on the jury’s ruling that Trump was not liable for rape,” The Hill reported at the time.
Trump argued in his counterclaim that Carroll made “these false statements with actual malice and ill will with an intent to significantly and spitefully harm and attack.” According to the filing, Trump “has been the subject of significant harm to his reputation, which, in turn, has yielded an inordinate amount of damages sustained as a result.”
Trump’s lawyers argued that Carroll’s comments on CNN were made on multiple platforms to ensure they reached a large audience.
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